Monte Sonnenberg’s piece on Wikileaks (“With friends like these, who needs enemies?”, Dec 7) walks a curious tightrope. More people have laid eyes on the leaked diplomatic cables through The Guardian, The New York Times and the Washington Post than through the original Wikileaks site itself, but he is not calling for their chief editors to be waterboarded at Gitmo. What gives?
The howling and hysteria over the leaked cables is every bit as much a danger to the establishment media as it is to the fragile ego and careers of high ranking political leaders. Neither seem to be able to decide whether the content is trivial and petty chatter between diplomats, or a lethal compromise of national security priorities. The “innocent lives placed in danger” is a perfect diversion from the real threat posed by Wikileaks; a pattern where governments everywhere have their sanctity and legitimacy stripped away, and the eventual (and predictable) attempt to achieve information lockdown, which is ultimately impossible in a networked, digital age. And of course, as Mr. Sonnenberg unwittingly reminds us, a desperate effort by archaic institutions to maintain their hallowed role as protected gatekeepers of our knowledge of the world.
One crucial aspect of a free and open society, Mr. Sonnenberg, is the right of people to decide for themselves when and if their government can keep secrets, and why. Perhaps if the mainstream media aspired to something more significant than stenographers of the political class, Wikileaks and the underground media culture would not be rendering them obsolete.
I am a huge supporter of WikiLeaks, and while a lot of what they release is pretty much idle irrelevancies (though they can be fun to read, as gossip often is) there is a lot in there that confirms what the anti-war libertarian crowd has been saying for years. So far, though, I haven't found anything at WikiLeaks that I didn't already know, at least in outline. I guess the main advantage is that now people can't call us crazy for believing it.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I am also an Objectivist anarchist and anathema to the ARI. Nice to meet another.
ReplyDeleteThere are a couple of things I find funny about this at the moment. One is that for all their preaching about the "indiscriminate disclosure" of secret documents, cutting Wikileaks off from legal methods of dissemination and fundraising if anything, is *more* likely to change what is published and how. From publishing a few hundred cables carefully selected in tandem with major new agencies to....? The hysterical morons should have stopped while they were ahead.
ReplyDeleteThe other are those unstated assumptions that 1. The highest priority of a government's "diplomatic activity" is the protection of its people (as opposed to redistributing wealth, acting to enforce corporate interests etc.) and 2. That these diplomats, generals and other politicians are, even with the best of intentions, and *better* at deciding our interests than the staff at Wikileaks. I'm not saying Wikileaks publishers would make good diplomats (whatever that would mean), just that, all things being equal, politicians don't claim the moral high ground just because they have more guns.